Added global Ammo Packs, in lieu of weapon specific ammo, where each pack grants you a small amount of ammo for each weapon in your inventory.
Reduced ammo respawn time from 40 seconds to 10 seconds.

Shitting fuck that sounds exceptionally terrible for all the obvious reasons. In addition to making item placement semi-redundant, it's going to make weapon and ammo management as a player semi-redundant.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a single hypothetical reason how this could any benefits to gameplay whilst it being an utterly awful idea is blindly obvious. Why the hell did they do it??

Loadouts doesn't sound that terrible for maybe CTF, but a bloody awful idea if it strays into any other modes.

Auto-bunny-jumping sounds like pointless dumbing down - and I say this as someone who never learnt to bunny jump. I accept it as a SKILL I've never tried to learn and would not want it handed to me on a plate for no reason.

One More Reason To Let My Account Expire When That Email Comes Again..

Some of the changes sound acceptable, but loadout and generic ammo seems absolutely inane. Why sacrifice a core charactistic of the game just to cater to a different player base (with uncertain outcome even).

I'm reconciling this with the words "in certain game modes." I haven't looked (bc why would i do research, it's friday) but I imagine that this is for a kind of butt-simple introductory mode for new players, where it's intentional that you don't have to have the maps pre-memorized to be competitive.

Quake is kind of harsh that way otherwise. Item control is part of the game, so if you don't know where the items are, your introductory experience becomes "spawn and die a lot until you learn the map." I guess we're blind to that harshness because we're used to it, or we all just pull the console down and run around a new MP map empty gawping at the art before we play it maybe. I know I've had similar experiences in other games (join, die a fuckload without knowing why, get irritated, quickly stop being in the mood for this, decide to come back some other time, never come back).

We were talking about this the other day in regards to teaching kids video games development.

Basically how we've become so good at designing interfaces that the damn kids aren't used to having to learn how to use them.

This extrapolates to all technology, especially games.

Finding the key by having to you know, explore a level and look at things must seem arcane to the damn kids of today who are used to NPC characters telling them where to go, world map overlays with pulsing ! points on them and so on.

The results of such designs are both good and bad. Some fucking suck (Doom3 was a parody of Doom1 level design if you strip away the graphics) whilst others were pretty cool (Deadspace line on the floor thing).

The mentality of the damn kid of today is that they should be expected to learn the absolute bare minimum before being able to play.

There's definitely a conflation between usability and fun, in modern game dev. I have been guilty of thinking this way for a long time, and maybe it's because a lot of times, usability is a valid goal.

But the negative side of treating usability as king, is the elimination of a lot of player activities that can be fun -- such as drawing a map or writing down clues. Player aids like that are sometimes necessary (getting truly stuck is definitely not fun) but they are best when they are opt-in. That's one of the positive aspects of the Dead Space locator line -- it was invisible until the player pressed pressed a button to activate it.

Also, the final state of evolution for modern game tutorials seems to be a tightly scripted first chapter of game which has most of the player's abilities locked out, so that you can literally only do one thing at each juncture, to make sure you learn it, and so that the player can't do any experimentation at their own pace and on their own terms. Randomly trying shit can also be fun, as long as the core interactions of the game give rich feedback (c.f. "juiciness".)

He also did a new one not so long ago about zelda, but not relevant to the discussion.

For the good or bad solutions I think the problem isn't so much that the developers are lazy, more that nobody cares enough about the usability during the development and as such the big ugly band aid is slapped on at the last minute.

The ship in three months panic :)

The reason they don't care is because subtle solutions are, well, subtle. It's not immediately obvious if something is working, and it only takes one person in the decision making process to get cold feet and the whole thing collapses like a domino run.

Interesting, this is straying into the territory of a blog post I've got mostly written that I haven't posted. I was going to do a post mortem on my way-old QBOARD.WAD level and it grew into a comparison of Doom and Quake level design centered on how much the player is or is not led by his nose.

The rest of the changes blow dick in FFA (nb I only play botmatch BUT aside from the quality of opponents it's the same fucking game / ruined game).

Starting weapons make it a ridiculous spam-fest, right off the bat it's rockets and plasma and bullshit flying everywhere. No build-up while players find weapons, much less variety in fighting due to that.

Most of the changes are pretty bad on paper, but could have worked fine if they weren't applied all at once. Spawning with the Machine Gun only always feels like shit, so I don't mind the loadouts that much - it's almost like a perverse form of Team Fortress with 16 classes.

However little balance was left, though, got completely thrown out of the window with making all ammo unified and making weapons respawn practically instantly. Sure, make me spawn with a RL and low ammo if you want to... but don't immediately let me get from 5 rockets to 25!

Item timers - every "pro" player used to count the next respawn time on their own. I don't mind this becoming global.

The new announcer couldn't sound any more bored.

A sound playing as feedback for when you get a kill isn't a bad idea - but why did it have to be a cartoony ding?!